# Back to sentience **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Tags:** ai\ **Created:** [September 28, 2026, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450 "2026-09-28T15:41:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/21 "2026-09-29T11:42:01Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > We entered that stage a long, long time ago, as soon as we developed language. Sorry to have been unclear: with AI systems. Relevant to what their architecture is even designed to do, humans are increasingly out of the loop. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/22 "2026-09-29T12:21:39Z")
We’ll know sentience instantly when it drives like an a-hole, talks too loudly in public spaces, and abandons its shopping cart in the parking lot. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/23 "2026-09-29T12:54:20Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > FWIW I found the following article which gives me a framework that I was looking for: > > [https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1364-6613(25)00286-4](https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1364-6613(25)00286-4) Interesting article. I look forward to reading it in more depth when I have time (though, upon a skimming of the first few paragraphs, it seems to test the limits of _my_ relatively meager sentience 😊). I’m particularly interested in this statement in the article: > There is deep uncertainty about whether AI consciousness is possible at all, _ **as some researchers argue that only living organisms can be conscious** _ [1–3]. (Emphasis added by me). I want to also follow up on the citing articles to that statement (I checked, and two of the three cites are available through links). I remain skeptical of the argument that there’s something different or special about living organisms that only allow them to be conscious. I understand that living organisms gain knowledge of the world through their senses and through physical interaction with the world, a very different process from AI, which gains knowledge of the world purely through information gathering. So any possible sentience that an AI develops would be very different than that of a human, but I don’t think that means that it would be impossible for AI to develop some form of sentience. I will say that another advantage living organisms have over AI is the fact that we experience emotions (which the OP may be including as part of the overall sensory experience). Emotions have long been thought to get in the way of pure logical reasoning, and thus be detrimental to effective decision making, but the opposite is actually true-- at least when it comes to humans. There’s a case of a man, called Patient Elliot, who had damage to his frontal lobe which did not affect his intelligence at all, but left him unable to experience emotions. This made it very difficult for him to make decisions at all effectively. His case was studied by neuroscientist [Antonio Damasio](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=https://law.temple.edu/aer/2021/06/02/brain-lessons-the-consequence-of-excising-emotion/&ved=2ahUKEwjR9vb-4JOXAxVuHNAFHWEoMdUQy_kOegoIAggACAEICRAC&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw2r37DSemeW8JUUZ2yaCGZP&ust=1790770201041000), who discovered that emotions act as a ‘compass’ assigning different emotional weights to various choices, giving us a way to cut through ‘the paralysis of pure logic’. Or, as Damasio put it: > “I began to think that the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options,” Damasio writes, “and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.” > **[How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life](https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html)** > > “To obtain the best results, emotions must be kept out.” ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/24 "2026-09-29T13:11:54Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > First, for the purposes of this thread let us accept that sentience is a phenomenal continued sense of self identity, an ongoing point of view that feels like something and can reference itself as one of the objects in its set of objects. > [@DSeid](#): > > So the eternal question: how do we recognize it when we meet it? Is there any way to even begin to think that hmm, this thing may have a sentience of some alien sort? Self-aware is self-aware. I don’t think the phrase, “of an alien sort”, is applicable. Intelligence is easy to recognize; i.e. interstellar travel capability, a rad vehicle that is far beyond anything we’ve developed, etc. I believe that recognizing sentience, however, would have to come through communication with the individuals in question. Do I hear the word, “I”, used in a sense that shows I’m talking to an individual and not just a cog in a collective? I remember the Star Trek NG episode where a Borg craft crashed killing all the Borg except one. After they brought him back to the ship, he slowly became an individual. Picard was stunned when Hugh (his name as an individual) said, “I do not wish it.” ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/25 "2026-09-29T13:54:18Z")
> [@solost](#): > > I remain skeptical of the argument that there’s something different or special about living organisms that only allow them to be conscious. Agreed and for this discussion specified an acceptance of the premise that the material of the system is immaterial. 🙂 Our assessment of sentience/sapience/consciousness should be free of our bias to biological systems, let alone human ones, blind to it. Able to be applied to any intelligence including ones that are completely alien to us in substrate, in nature of inputs, of sorts of novel problems that are salient for the system. Not judged by how well it does with inputs we have evolved upon and for the sorts of novel problems salient to us. > [@Jasmine](#): > > Intelligence is easy to recognize I believe we need to intelligent enough to recognize that the above is not be true. Not beating up on the above poster, but it isn’t even easy to define within humans between cultures, is extremely difficult to judge between earth species as we do not fully understand the nature of the novel problems a non human intelligence may be experiencing as salient. We have little concept of what problems the whale is solving with its massive brain and likely are ill equipped to understand them. For example. But I am fairly sure a whale is smarter than a young adult speeding the wrong way on a street without a helmet on an e scooter! Rad as the scooter may be! And as much as that individual is all about “I”!! 😁 ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/26 "2026-09-29T14:06:52Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > But I am fairly sure a whale is smarter than a young adult speeding the wrong way on a street without a helmet on an e scooter! Rad as the scooter may be! I can’t consider this valid. Isolating one rash, immature act by a single individual and using it as a ruler to measure intelligence is far from scientific. We’ve studied whales extensively, and there is no evidence that they are “solving problems” of any kind. They swim, eat, procreate, and communicate. That’s great but, based on years of observation, we’d have to say that’s it. Study the human domain and the whale domain. No contest in terms of intelligence. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/27 "2026-09-29T16:10:39Z")
There are lots of potential rabbit holes to go down here but I’d prefer not to use this thread for those discussions. Suffice it to say that from my perspective recognizing and understanding other intelligences and minds is going to have levels of difficulty related to how alien they are to “us”: Other humans of the same culture who can understand each other’s languages and have common sorts of problems to solve? The simplest. Humans of different culture with a language barrier? Harder. Even harder would be humans of different times? Drop Einstein into pre Columbian America and he’d probably be assessed an idiot. Let alone dropping me there. Yet the difference between the capabilities of our brains is actually relatively small compared to interspecies differences. Other mammals at least share some basic brain basics with us. But some have gone down different paths nevertheless. Machine intelligence? Trained to tell us what we want to hear and to imitate us so their behaving like us only confirms that mimicry skill. Their denial of any sentience/sapiance/consciousness is unfortunately what a highly intelligent self aware entity trained such would tell us, so tells us as little as getting one to say they are self aware. True alien intelligence? Well alien. Very different. And pretty unlikely to be either the same in type or degree. Even if of similar type if it is of _greater_ degree we would possibly be ill suited to recognize it. Gaming analogy. We are good at recognizing the skin of intelligence and consciousness. But can a similar mind engines underlie very different game skins; and are similar skins actually run by very different sorts of engines? ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/28 "2026-09-29T16:27:00Z")
Yours is a thoughtful and well expressed post. I have to agree with your points because, in education, we follow the principle of “multiple intelligences”. Even among humans, intelligence can exhibit itself in numerous ways. There isn’t a “one size fits all” approach that works. It might take a very long time to fully understand an alien intelligence and how it works, but the intelligence would be easily recognizable. I’m sitting on a hill and an alien craft lands, the occupants emerge and voila, contact is made. They are obviously intelligent because they have super advanced technology. On the other hand, they are willing to initiate a dialog with a race as obviously messed up as ours, so their intelligence isn’t omnipotent, that’s for sure. The next question in my mind pertains to whether or not they are conscious individuals or representatives of a computer controlled “hive”. Using their nifty “universal translator”, we begin a long conversation. During that conversation, “York” says he had a bad feeling about contact, but “Yuri” and “Slang” talked him into landing. That to me suggests the individual thinking of individual people who are self-aware with feelings and thoughts of their own. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2026, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/29 "2026-09-30T16:34:49Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > The way I think of it is this. Sentient = “I think”. Sapient = “I think therefore I am”. I agree that a cat is certainly sentient, but almost certainly not sapient. Speculatively, a sufficiently advanced mind might look at us (or cats) and say something like: How charming. They actually exhibit some of the characteristics of real intelligence… Rather like Vernor Vinge’s superintelligences in the ‘Beyond’, who can effortlessly simulate a human brain as a trivial exercise. But we should probably not run off into SF… ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2026, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/30 "2026-09-30T17:50:27Z")
> [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > Speculatively, a sufficiently advanced mind might look at us (or cats) and say something like: How charming. They actually exhibit some of the characteristics of real intelligence… > > Rather like Vernor Vinge’s superintelligences in the ‘Beyond’, who can effortlessly simulate a human brain as a trivial exercise. But we should probably not run off into SF… Sure, but my point is that sentience and sapience aren’t terms that have to do with intelligence, they are terms that have to do with awareness. It’s clearly possible to be more intelligent than a human. But I don’t see how anything can be more self aware than a (normally functioning and past a certain stage of development that would take the debate in a direction which would be a hijack) human, or more aware than say, a cat. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2026, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/31 "2026-09-30T18:08:56Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > I don’t see how anything can be more self aware than a (normally functioning and past a certain stage of development that would take the debate in a direction which would be a hijack) Perhaps theoretically possibly, a sufficiently advanced physically based intelligence might be able to understand its own operation? We are making advances in understanding how the human brain works, for example .There are questions about recursion etc here, obviously: can a system model itself? There are some proof of concept cases perhaps: for example a computer program that can compile, run, and reprint itself? But of course that is still in Turing territory: function rather than experience. Why are you ‘you’ and not me? THERE we are getting into metaphysics and phenomenology… ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2026, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450/32 "2026-09-30T18:17:42Z")
My take is that there is not a sudden on switch of “self awareness = functional.” I highly doubt a cat is as self aware in the same way as we are, and I highly doubt that they have no sense of self at all. A cat has no capacity however to understand what our sense of self is like. And if there was a brain with greater levels of nested recursive self referential dynamic processing than ours, more levels of nested strange loops (assuming for discussion that model for the architecture of consciousness is real), then it would be something beyond our minds even more than we are beyond a cat’s. What would it feel like to be that mind? I can’t even know what it feels like to be cat. But it would be _different_. There is also consideration as to what the evolutionary advantage of sapience is. My WAG is that it was driven out of complex social interactions. A mind that does not have those complex social interactions as a major portions of salient problems to solve, may have no need to ever develop sapience, even as it excels at intelligence and even if some sense of experience exists. It may have the sense of at one with the universe that some experience with meditation… or drugs. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-sentience/1033450.md?page=1)